Paper short abstract:

We examine the responsibility that a person has on her own achievements (well-being) paying attention to mind, inherited attributes that facilitates or constrains social adaptability, and the community in which this person takes decisions. An empirical analysis is based on data from ESS 2014.

Paper long abstract:

A person might modify some of the attributes that she inherited from her parents and her community. Social and cultural capital are one of the attributes that a person inherits (and with effort could be modified) and that facilitates or constraints her adaptability (success) to the society. In this paper we characterize poverty traps that are driven by the inherited social capital: a person does not have the social and cultural capital required to make a change, enhancing her social capital, so that this person acquires greater well-being over time.

The paper examines the person's responsibility on her own achievements, taking into account the structure of mind (mainly driven by social and automatic thinking), the community in which the person takes decisions, and the inherited social and cultural capital. Emphasis is given to disentangle the dynamics of poverty and discrimination as highlighted by the reproduction of the social structure.

We empirically examine responsibility issues using data from European Social Survey 2014. Specifically, we examine the extent by which the education of parents explains healthy behaviour of young adults (14-21 age cohorts). Next, we examine the community and individual determinants of behaviour in adults (22-44 age cohorts). We obtain that parents' education explains young adults' healthy behaviours that are socially accepted, but have no influence on unhealthy (but socially accepted) behaviour such as alcohol consumption. When we focus on adults' behaviour, we obtain that the one's own education replace the influence of parents' education, but not the influence of the community.